The riot happened because the Senate acquitted Trump [View all]

[DonViejo]

The impeachment trial was a missed chance to stop the president’s abusive behavior.

By Norman Eisen

Norman Eisen was a special counsel for the House Judiciary Committee for the impeachment and trial of Donald Trump. He is a senior fellow at Brookings, counsel for the Voter Protection Program and author of “A Case for the American People.”

Jan. 8, 2021 at 1:17 p.m. EST

There was a terrible paradox in the images of Republican members of Congress driven into safe rooms by insurrectionists whom President Trump had whipped into a frenzy. As a lawyer for the Democratic House managers at Trump’s impeachment and trial, I sat on the floor of the House and the Senate as these same lawmakers refused to hold him accountable, knowingly unleashing the storm that swept over them, their Democratic colleagues and the nation on Wednesday. Impeachment manager Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the House Judiciary Committee chairman, had warned them: “President Trump has made clear in word and deed that he will persist in such conduct if he is not removed from power. He poses a continuing threat to our nation, to the integrity of our elections and to our democratic order. He must not remain in power one moment longer.”

This last week’s events — and indeed all the president’s abuses during this election cycle and the last year — are a consequence of their refusal to convict him in his impeachment trial. With the sole exception of Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah), not a single Republican in the Senate or the House would recognize the threat then. On the contrary. Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) went so far as to say: “I believe that the president has learned from this case. The president has been impeached. That’s a pretty big lesson.”

Yes, Trump did learn a lesson: He learned that he can abuse his power and obstruct the investigation of that abuse, and get away unscathed to commit more high crimes and misdemeanors. Abuse and obstruction were, of course, the two high crimes for which we prosecuted Trump in the Ukraine matter. The first article of impeachment laid out the abuse. It consisted of his pressure campaign on Ukraine to attack his most-feared opponent in the presidential race, Joe Biden, including the infamous July 2019 call to President Volodymyr Zelensky: “I would like you to do us a favor though.” The obstruction consisted of his attempts to hide that wrongdoing. We pointed out too that these were not isolated incidents, but only the latest episodes in a recurring pattern of abuse and obstruction that had been documented by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Trump followed an identical pattern in his post-election assault on American democracy, culminating in another plea to another elected official to try to undermine Biden yet again. On Jan. 2, he called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and tried to use the power of the presidency to pressure the secretary to “find 11,780 votes” and to “get this thing straightened out fast.” The president of the United States also suggested that not doing so would be “a criminal offense” and a “big risk to you” and to “your lawyer.”

As with Ukraine, when the president was caught in the act, he pivoted to more obstruction. Echoing his pronouncement that the Zelensky call was “perfect,” he declared that he had done nothing wrong in talking to Raffensperger and that “everyone loved my phone call.” He wrapped that lie in layers of other prevarications about supposed Georgia electoral wrongdoing — like his claim that he had hundreds of thousands of additional votes. His allegations were baseless.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/impeachment-senate-trump-acquitted/2021/01/08/157fb03e-515c-11eb-bda4-615aaefd0555_story.html